187. Emil and the Detectives

As a child, one of my favorite books was Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. I read the Puffin edition which was a new English translation published in 1959. However, it had been originally published in German back in 1929, and the first English edition had followed just two years later.

I had been introduced to Puffins as an eight-year-old in the early 60′s, and have loved them ever since. When we lived in Athens my parents would let me collect the family’s small change, and when the lepta coins added up to 60 drachma, I could string them together and go out to the English bookstore to buy a Puffin book. Later, in India, I was allowed to choose several Puffins regularly from the latest catalogue, and when they arrived a few weeks later in a paper parcel, I would disappear into other worlds for weeks on end. Somehow through all our moves I managed to save all my old Puffins, and collected still more in the United States after my son was born. When I read all my old favorites to him, many of them became his as well, among them Swallows and Amazons, The Family from One End Street, The Children Who lived in a Barn, Stig of the Dump, The Railway Children (in fact, all the E. Nesbits), Friday’s Tunnel (an all-time favorite), The Silver Sword, and of course, Emil and the Detectives.

It seems to me that too many children’s writers talk down to their readers, something that Puffin authors never did (especially under the editorship of Kaye Webb, from 1961-1979). Erich Kästner dealt with subjects that might have seemed inappropriate for children, and his young readers so appreciated this. In Emil and the Detectives, Emil Tischbein is the only son of a widowed mother who works hard to support them and whom Erich adores fiercely, protectively, despite how much she fusses over him. As the novel begins, Mrs. Tischbein is preparing to send her beloved son to Berlin for a holiday to stay with his aunt, uncle, and Grandma and entrusts him with an envelope of her carefully-saved money to carry along with him. Kästner speaks directly to his young readers about why such a small amount of money means so much to Emi and his mother, and why Emil tries so hard to help his mother even though he certainly isn’t a goody-goody. Similarly, in his Lottie and Lisa (Das doppelte Lottchen in German, later made into the film The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills) he speaks frankly to his readers about divorce and how it affects children.

To me, the most terrifying scene was the one where Emil falls asleep alone in the train carriage with a strange—and ominously friendly—man and wakes up to find the precious envelope gone. Because it is unacceptable to him that he should lose his mother’s hard-earned money, he, his cousin Pony, and a gang of boys fan out into the streets of Berlin with a brilliant plan to catch the thief and recover the money, coming into contact with various  shady characters along the way. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens, but Kästner is a brilliant storyteller and knows how to capture a child’s imagination.

It was only as an adult that I read about Kästner’s own life. Emil was the most popular of his novels and the only one to have escaped censorship by the Nazis. Kästner was a pacifist and opposed to the Nazis, who burned his books in 1933, labeling them “contrary to the German sprit.” Like Emil, he was very close to his mother—in fact, it is thought that she was the main reason why he didn’t leave Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power.

Emil and the Detectives is still in print and has been written up as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month.

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180. The Magic of Found Objects

Over the years, hundreds of small found objects—lucky stones, a plastic Highlander, a Swiss army knife—have washed up at my feet. Some of them have held a special symbolic value for me and I have endowed them with a talismanic power; until they have slipped from my hands and fallen somewhere, waiting latent and unseen for the next passer-by, who in turn will slip them into his or her pocket for a spell.

The first of a succession of lucky stones was my most beloved, fished for me out of a shallow cove in the Aegean Sea by a mysterious mer-woman (see Greece in the 60s: Expatriates & Other Animals), and borne by me to India, where I carried it to exams for years afterwards; until it was lost and in due course, another took its place. Thirty years later, on another coastline, I came upon the plastic Highlander washed up on the shores of the Arabian Sea near my father’s ancestral home and bore it back to the United States with me, where it occupies pride of place on a tray of seashells and stones in our bathroom.

The Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts (planetware.com)

Andrew and I found the Swiss army knife on a hillside adjoining the Old North Bridge over the Concord River back in 1975, on the historic 200^th anniversary of the American Revolution (see Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn). The People’s Bicentennial Commission, which sought to commemorate and revive the spirit of revolution that had been killed by the wealthy landowning and monied classes, held a concert and campout the night before President Gerald Ford was to arrive by helicopter on April 19^th, the date of the battle that sparked the revolutionary war. (Ironically, their logo used the image on the historic Gadsden flag with the coiled rattlesnake, bearing the warning, “Don’t Tread on Me,” re-appropriated a generation later by the extreme right-wing Tea Party, which seeks to revive a very differently-remembered idea of freedom.)

protestors at the Old North Bridge, held back by police (contrariansview.org)

I can’t remember much of the day except the large crowd, the celebratory spirit, and the 40,000 protestors surging over the Old North Bridge as the President landed. Afterwards, when the tidal wave of people had receded, we stayed behind to help with the clean-up of Buttrick Field, where Andrew picked up a knife from among the debris. It was a fisherman’s knife, with the image of a fish inlaid into the handle and an implement for filleting among its multitude of fold-out tools. We had no way of identifying its rightful owners, so we kept it to commemorate that day, and used it on many a camping trip. We may still have it hidden away at the bottom of a drawer somewhere, but I haven’t seen it for awhile now. Perhaps we accidentally left it behind on the banks of another river, and it has passed into the hands of new owners who treasure it as once we did.

White Pond, Concord (50swims.blogspot.com)

The last object was actually re-found: long given up for lost, it was miraculously restored to me. We were living in Concord, in my in-laws’ cottage perched on the steeply sloping shore of White Pond, a deep and ancient body of water mentioned by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, and reputedly connected to Walden Pond by an underground spring. The pond’s water level fluctuated over the years, so that sometimes the water lapped up under our boardwalk and at other times receded so that there was quite a wide strip of sandy beach. One year, after a swim in the pond, I discovered that I had lost my favorite necklace, a long steely-metallic chain hung with cascades of tiny sequin-like discs that I used to wear looped twice or three times around my neck. After looking everywhere for it, I concluded sadly that I must have dropped it in the water, where it would have sunk irretrievably into the primeval mud that lined the bottom, sixty feet deep in places. Years went by and although I looked for a replacement, I never found another necklace like that one. Then, late one summer, when the water was at a lower ebb than others, I was sitting idly on the boardwalk, dangling my legs over the edge, when I saw something glinting in the sunlight through a crack in one of its loose old planks. Prying up the board, I reached carefully in, thinking perhaps to pick out a jagged piece of broken glass. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found my beloved necklace, a little tarnished, but still amazingly intact after so many years! It had not been lost after all, but had been lying in the shallows under the boardwalk all along, where I must have walked over it a thousand times.

Perhaps I do know why these found objects mean so much to me. Each of them holds within it the luminous spirit of its time and place, and of the people with whom I associate it. My family, having moved so frequently and so far across three continents, has had to leave almost everything and everyone behind every time. Carried in on invisible currents to rest at my feet, these little things, the flotsam and jetsam of my life, are all the more precious to me because I know that they are likely to be swept away as unexpectedly as they came. But while I have them, I hold them close to my heart.

Caz from a Little Learning For Two (alittlelearningfortwo.blogspot.com)

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148. Avoiding the Plague

smallpox vaccination scar

The bubonic plague! The very name conjures up ghoulish images of the medieval era, but my Dad remembers two outbreaks of the dreaded disease in the twentieth century, during his own childhood in Ratnagiri. He can date the second one fairly accurately to 1939 or 1940, because the outbreak coincided with his matriculation exams and, due to the danger of infection in the district town of Ratnagiri, he had to travel all the way to Kolhapur to sit them. (He recalls, too, that he left his geometry set (remember those?) at home and had to lose valuable exam time waiting to borrow his friend’s compass and protractor.) The first outbreak must have been about five years earlier. Since the plague is spread by rat fleas and rats frequent built-up areas, his whole family moved to the edge of town and camped out for the duration. Dad remembers it only as fun, but I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been for his mother to manage a household of eight children and a husband who had to get dressed for court  in the morning while living in tents. But it worked: no one in the family was stricken with the plague, and our grandparents successfully raised all eight of their children to adulthood, no mean feat in the days before antibiotics were available to treat infections. In the early twentieth century, the plague killed an estimated 10 million people in India.

It’s hard to remember that it was not until the Second World War that antibiotics became available, not until 1942 that penicillin was being mass-produced. Before then, a host of childhood diseases were seriously life-threatening. My paternal grandparents were lucky enough not to lose a child, but my maternal grandparents were not so fortunate. Two of their eight children died of diptheria before 1920, and although a vaccine became available in the mid-1920’s it wasn’t until 1940, when my mother was a teenager, that a nationwide vaccination program was established in Britain. In-between, 2,500 children died from diptheria every year.

Even in my own childhood vaccinations were still fairly new, and our annual trip to the doctor for a series of injections—smallpox, cholera, polio—was serious business. Those of us who grew up before the World Health Organization’s smallpox radication campaign, which started in 1967 and was finally successful in 1980, all bear the lifelong scars of our injections; until then, smallpox epidemics raged around the world . My father came down with the disease as a young man—a mild case, thankfully—and still carries a few marks from it. My father-in-law was not so lucky, and came down with polio in 1953, when Andrew was a baby, just months before Jonas Salk developed his vaccine. He still suffers from post-polio syndrome.

Not surprisingly, injections loomed large in our young minds. Our instincts told us to avoid them like the plague, but reason reminded us that we needed them to avoid the plague. We steeled ourselves to face them bravely, but they certainly weren’t any fun. One day in the early 1960s, when I was about eight, I arrived at school in Athens to the announcement that everyone in the whole school was going to be vaccinated—for what, I don’t remember, but I think it was chicken pox (for which a vaccine was not to be available until the 1990s). Our collective heart sank, but we all lined up dutifully to walk one by one into a classroom set up as a makeshift infirmary and walk out by another door. When it was my turn, I screwed up my courage and stretched out my arm to a teacher who prepped the area with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball. As I prepared myself for the needle, I was greeted with, “April Fool!” It was all an elaborate April Fool’s Day hoax.

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147. Hollyhocks and Hornworms

Gulmohar, or Flame of the Forest (photo courtesy of Ranjeet Jagtap)

Every year when the gulmohar tree, or Flame of the Forest, bloomed, the entire Hijli campus in Kharagpur was a riot of color. I derived so much pleasure from its flowers, not only aesthetic, but also tactile. Their long red stamens captured my imagination, and I conceived a game in which two opponents, each holding a stalk, locked heads of those rich, powdery anthers until the winner succeeded in pulling the head off her opponent’s filament. The mature seed pods of the gulmohar tree were also a source of fun. They hardened and rattled when dry, and became play-swords and percussion instruments.

Gulmohar stamens (wanderingmist.com)

Shak-Shak (photo by Dinesh Valke on flickr)

The profusion of brilliant blossoms gave me another idea: couldn’t we find a way to make Holi dyes by soaking and grinding them? I never succeeded in this endeavor, but I see that nearly half-a-century later, people are using gulmohur flowers and leaves to make natural dyes for Holi and starting to investigate gulmohar flowers as a source of natural dyes for other purposes as well.

The hibiscus, showy and ubiquitous, was another flower that I tried, but failed, to put to practical use. Its common name, shoe flower, gave me the idea of using it to polish my school-uniform shoes, which were perennially scuffed and dusty. Alas, while it crushed the beautiful red blossoms, it failed to impart any lasting shine to my black lace-ups.

I wasn’t only destructive, though. One of my favorite flowers were antirrhinums, or snapdragons. Like so many children, I delighted in pinching them gently but firmly between thumb and forefinger so that their mouths opened and shut. Both in India and in Greece there were the trees, varieties of mimosa, perhaps, whose feathery compound leaves closed up if you so much as brushed up against them. Of course I did, and never tired of watching them draw together defensively.

Through the long summers in Greece, when the heat melted the tar on the roads, I found endless fascination in natural life. When we went to the seaside, I played with the sea cucumbers, making their pods snap like bubble plastic. In Athens I played in overgrown urban plots, part cultivated, part wild. The stands of hollyhocks were strange giraffe-like plants, with their long, woody stalks covered in short, rough hairs, their dry leaves, which always semed to be full of insect-holes, and their green geometric seed-pods. The flowers themselves seemed incidental to me.

Greek poppies

Flaming red poppies grew everywhere. The flowers quickly bloomed and were as quickly blown, but the seedpods lasted, and it was fascinating to watch them dry and burst open, and sometimes to pry off the cap and squeeze out the thousands of tiny seeds.

It was only much later, in America, that I would be introduced to dried poppyseeds sprinkled on bagels and cream cheese. And not having been introduced to The Wizard of Oz, either, I knew nothing of the soporific properties of opium poppies.

The small creatures that lived on the plants also gave me pleasure. I was especially fond of common garden snails, and could lie on my stomach for hours watching them moving slowly and steadily forward under their spiralling shells, their bulbous-tipped antennae stretching ahead of them, a narrow glistening trail in their wake. Like the mimosa leaves, they too would close up defensively, no matter how lightly their shell was tapped.

©National Trust Images/NaturePL/Chris O’Reilly

It wasn’t until I was an adult living in the United States, when work, not play, was at stake, that I began to see these little creatures as my adversaries. Not snails, but slugs, were our enemies in the garden in Winchendon, especially in the battle over buttery lettuce leaves, both of our favorites. It’s funny how likeable snails are, and how unlikeable slugs, even though the former are just slugs with their shells on the outside. Even the snail’s lightly sticky, glistening trail, so magical to me as a child, is loathsome slime when it emanates from a slug.

I’m not going to spoil this idyll with a litany of garden pests, but there is one creature whose life is so bound up with the plant it loves that it embodies the old adage, You are what you eat: the tomato hornworm. If I could only erase the traumatic memories of my seven-year war with hornworms in Winchendon, I could see myself taking as much pleasure in their plump succulence, as close to a green tomato as a living being can get, as I did in the progress of snails as a child.

tomato hornworm

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139. Sealed With a Kiss

It’s hardly necessary to say that Valentine’s Day is overblown and over-commercialized, heralded by a barrage of advertising that peddles greeting cards, red roses, dark chocolate, sentiment by the truckload, love itself. In my childhood and youth, February the 14th was marked very differently, when it was marked at all. But I imagine that children and young teens have always had rituals that introduce them to the gender norms of their society and prepare them for courtship before it begins in earnest.

In my primary school in Athens I seem to recall a flutter of excitement accompanying the approach of the day, when a student might receive an anonymous Valentine in the internal mail, creating breathless speculation as to the identities of both sender and receiver—among the girls, at least; only dread and embarrassment among the boys, or so they let it be known. As children growing up without the influence of television (or even, in my case, the radio), we were effectively shielded from the incipient youth culture of the early 1960s, our innocent imitations taking their cues from romantic pop songs. Although my parents’ small collection of 45-rpm singles and 33-rpm EP’s contained next-to-no American records, somehow I learned a few songs, memorably Oh Carol (See St. Catherine’s and Miss Tutte), Wolverton Mountain, and perhaps my favorite, Sealed With a Kiss.

In boarding school in Darjeeling we didn’t mark the day at all, but nevertheless had our own year-round rituals and practices that signified to whom our hearts had been given, for the time being, anyway. Again, music gave words—inadequate approximations always, but words just the same—to the inchoate murmurings of our young hearts. I can still see the boys in The Strange Infatuation, our co-ed band at Mount Hermon, sending shivers down our spines with their performance of the Beatles’ Boys at a rehearsal snatched between Afternoon Study and dinnertime. We girls, not to be outdone, responded with a sultry imitation of Nancy Sinatra’s Boots.

In my year-long sojourn in England in 1968-69, I was mostly an outside observer of the strange courtship rituals of British teens. The kind of interaction with the opposite sex that I experienced personally was one at a double remove from the person in question. A boy who had his eye on me might send his friend to tell my girlfriend that he liked me. If I looked up and dared to meet his eye, he would look away hastily, pretending not to have seen me; and if I were to cross the boy-girl divide and actually ask him to confirm the truth of his friend’s message, he would certainly deny everything. Of course, the whole exercise was based on the unspoken understanding that I would never have the nerve to do so. Whether and, if so, how they celebrated Valentine’s Day, I honestly can’t remember.

By 1970, when we got to America and the avant-garde Brookline High School, dating was already considered passé, an teen rituals of the 1950s such as the Senior Prom and Valentine’s Day similarly retrograde. The cool thing to do was to go out in a large mixed group, and not to seem to have a preference for any one individual. But of course, we did have preferences, which we still whispered about with our girlfriends and recorded in our secret diaries. Though we could have friendships and carry on political and philosophical conversations with boys that were never dreamed of  in our Indian schooldays, our feelings were essentially unchanged: we were still unsure of ourselves and of how to interpret and express all that we were feeling. Ostensibly, all the rules had changed; in reality, we were as clueless as teenagers have always been.

Tweety-n-Sylvester Valentine (from valentine-cards.blogspot.com)

By the time Nikhil was in primary school in the States a generation later, it was obligatory for all students to make and distribute Valentines to all their classmates, so as not to make anyone feel left out. At first, I think, he rather enjoyed the process, taking trouble with each and every card in the intended spirit of inclusiveness, but as he got older, his interest progressively diminished (or so he feigned, anyway) until it was his long-suffering mother buying the Love Hearts candy and the Valentines and making sure that he inscribed and addressed them all. Still, I got the distinct impression that, despite the best efforts of the well-meaning authorities,  certain girls and boys inevitably received more Valentines than did others, and rumors circulated that so-and-so had been seen opening a top-secret envelope that was clearly a cut above the innocuous offerings bought in bulk at CVS or Woolworth’s.

The whispers and giggles of elementary school soon passed. In middle school Nikhil was more interested in film-making than in girls; the love song that echoes through the late 1990’s for me is Aqua’s Dr. Jones, to which he made his first music video starring all his best friends (in my maternal opinion much better than the official one here). The friendships deepened, love flowered all around, and my memories of his high school days are characterized by a heap of leggy teenagers piled on the couch in our den during a study break, melting into the ultra-romantic Come What May from Moulin Rouge or Enya’s May it Be in Lord of the Rings.

You may notice that I have skipped over a quarter of a century, between my young adulthood and that of my son’s. What happened in-between? Just about everything. What was all that Valentine’s stuff all about? Little more than nothing. A rehearsal for a rehearsal. Love, the real thing, remains as mysterious as it has ever been.

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134. Darshan, or You Never Can Tell

According to the concept of darshan, meaning “sight” or “vision” in Sanskrit,  a person is believed to gain merit by coming into the presence of a sage or a deity, even a child who is too young to be fully aware of what he or she is experiencing. Therefore parents will often take their children with them when they go to receive darshan of a guru, trusting that the benevolence of the enlightened one will heighten the consciousness of their offspring and bestow blessings that will guide and protect them.

Of course, parents everywhere seek to bring their children into the presence of greatness, and mine were no exception. My mother had loved ballet ever since she had taken classes at night school in post-war London. While we were living in Athens in 1962, the opportunity arose to see the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn dance with the great Rudolf Nureyev, an occasion not to be missed. The setting was the 1800 year-old Herodes Atticus outdoor theatre at the Acropolis on a summer’s night; the performance, the sublime Swan Lake. But there was one problem: I was too young to appreciate it.

At eight, I was old enough to know that I ought to have been loving every moment, but, looking down the steep stone steps at the lighted stage with the tiny figures flitting across it, I struggled to stay awake even as I admonished myself to pay attention and remember this evening. Half a century later I do remember it, and am proud to be able to say that I once saw the great Fonteyn and Nureyev dance together, but at the time I couldn’t make much sense of what I saw. To tell the awful truth, I was bored. Normally, I begged to be allowed to stay up with my Greek friends, who, having taken siestas in the afternoon, were able to play late into the long summer nights.  And here I was out with the grown-ups having the experience of a lifetime, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

Halley's Comet 1986 (spacestationinfo.com)

When I became a parent, I too longed to share with my child the things that I valued, to give him the opportunity to see awe-inspiring sights or to benefit from coming into the presence of beauty and wisdom. In the Spring of 1986, when Nikhil was little more than a year old, Halley’s comet came around, a visitation that occurs only once every 76 years. Since we were living in Winchendon at the time, removed from big-city lights, we could expect to get a good view of the comet on a clear night. We woke one bitter-cold night at the appointed time and dressed in our warmest clothes. Although Nikhil was sleeping soundly, I couldn’t bear to let him miss this experience, so I bundled him up in layer upon layer of woolly all-in-ones and blankets and carried him out to the car, still sleeping. We drove to the best spot and all stood looking up as long as we could stand it, with me holding the sleepy Nikhil aloft and pointing out the comet to him. Does he remember that historic night? Of course not. But did he benefit from turning his gaze upward on that late-night excursion? I would certainly like to think so.

Fast-forward to 1999, when Nikhil was 14 and the eminent postcolonial scholar Edward Said came to Amherst to speak at Hampshire College on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, Out of Place. Said was one of the scholars I most admired, so I was eager to introduce Nikhil to his work. Unfortunately that day Nikhil happened to have come down with a streaming cold, and he was in no condition to attend the talk. But I would not take no for an answer. I was determined that Nikhil should take the chance to see the great man and to hear him speak, so I more-or-less overrode his protestations and administered an anti-histamine that was advertised to dry up his teary eyes and runny nose for 12 hours. Hustling him into the car and to the lecture hall, I managed to bag two seats right near the front.

As soon as Professor Said entered and began to speak I was transfixed, listening with rapt attention, and only glancing at Nikhil periodically to see whether the antihistamine was taking effect. To my mortification, Nikhil kept nodding off throughout; every time I looked over, he seemed to be tipping slowly sideways, until he would catch himself with a start and jerk upright again. I kept shooting him stern looks, but to no avail. When the lecture was over and I demanded to know the meaning of my son’s rude behavior, he returned my demand with another: what on earth had been in that pill? Back home, I learned the awful truth: it was a sedating antihistamine whose label warned that it would cause drowsiness and should be taken only at night; in my eagerness for him to receive darshan of the great Edward Said, I had drugged my own son! Needless to say, he has no recollection whatsoever of that particular historic event; still, I tell myself that he nonetheless derived some benefit from the experience.

I was not destined to become a ballet dancer, despite my mother’s best efforts. As a child I was agile, but as likely to be found up a tree than on the ground. As a girl one of my more embarrassing moments was the May Day maypole dancing performance at St. Agnes in Kharagpur when I skipped in the wrong direction and tied my entire group in knots around our maypole. Still worse was the evening when, visiting my friend Preet in Gangtok, Sikkim, some of the royal family came to visit and each of us girls was asked to pair up with a prince for a dance. I had neither learned a foxtrot nor slow-danced with a boy before, and in my awkwardness, I’m afraid I stepped all over his feet. Somehow we got through the dance, but that evening I learned what it felt like to want to sink through the floor. Even so, even if it did not bestow physical grace upon me, I maintain that, in time, my darshan of the divine Fonteyn and Nureyev will turn out to have given me something of lasting value. You never can tell.

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123. That Funny Accent

Peter Sellers in The Party (from bootlegtunzworld-org)

Accents are funny things. Unless a person is continually made aware of the fact that she has one, the thought might never occur to her. Accents change or are perceived differently depending on who’s listening. All accents are not equal: some carry social capital while others are targets of derision, so that people assume or cultivate the former while downplaying or destroying the latter. And as with skin color, so with accents: a dominant one does not recognize itself as such; it is only Others, those who speak differently, who are considered to have them.

As a child in Kharagpur, I was expected by my parents, each for his or her different reasons, to speak the Queen’s English, and I did—at least, when I was with them. But with my friends I automatically switched into the reigning Anglo-Indian; if I hadn’t, not only would I have been seen as a snob, especially in those early post-Independence years, but I simply would not have been understood. When friends came over to our house to play and my mother spoke to them, I had to step in and translate. This was hazardous, because if my father had caught me speaking in the sing-song Anglo-Indian accent, I would have been in trouble.

During my two-and-a-half years at the British Embassy School in Athens, Standard English was the norm, so my Queen’s English became naturalized. Ironically,  during my brief stay at Gospel Oak school in London when I was nine, not a single child in my class had that so-called standard accent. When the class had to select someone to recite William Blake’s poem “Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?” at a school assembly, they chose me, the outsider. Why? Because “she doesn’t have an accent”! The children living in London, the insiders from my perspective, felt themselves to be not-quite-normal because they spoke in the diversity of ways people actually speak; while I, living outside of the country, had been taught to cultivate “BBC English.”  (Nowadays, of course, fewer BBC broadcasters use Standard English—regional and working-class (or faux working-class) accents having become not only acceptable, but trendy—unless, perhaps, they are British Asians.)

My accent now adjusts reflexively to blend in with my milieu. Even so, when I am visiting my English family they consider it wholly American, while back in the States I still get regular comments on “that lovely English accent.” The simple truth is that people recognize difference, not sameness. When I took Nikhil with me to India at age 13, I remember him squirming with embarrassment upon hearing my re-Indianized accent among my Indian family. Yet I was not switching it on deliberately, just doing what had become second-nature. In fact, it would be difficult for me to identify my “real” accent, since it is more accurately a continuum, a range of different registers that changes with my environment.

Much as my accent has Americanized itself over the more than forty years I have lived in the States—and I still remember my mother crying out as if in pain when she first heard me roll my r’s American-style—I wonder why I have retained so much of my English accent. Is it an affectation, as some people may suspect? Is it that by age 15 one is fully formed, and one’s accent, like the tastes and values one was raised with, are now permanent, imprinted with indelible ink that can only fade but never disappear altogether? Or is it that I have regularly received positive reinforcement for it, so that there is little incentive to change? Would I have had a greater incentive to cast off my accent if it had been considered funny rather than charming?

I confess that I have expressed contempt in the past for those who take the “accent reduction” classes advertized in newspapers like India Abroad that cater to Indian Americans. But I feel ashamed of that contempt,  because Indian accents, which I love, and never tire of listening to in all their rich diversity, are, unlike English accents, regularly ridiculed in both the United States and Britain, and can be a real handicap for the immigrant seeking to assimilate to a new and sometimes unwelcoming society. The Indian accent has been so caricatured, as exemplified in Britain by Peter Sellers’ Indian doctor in the song “Goodness Gracious Me” and his films The Millionairess (1960) and The Party (1968); and in the U.S. by Hank Azaria’s Apu, the Indian convenience store owner in The Simpsons. So much have they become the norm, that—as depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia—Indians themselves looking for acting roles are not considered “authentic” unless they exaggerate their accents into mockeries of themselves. Not so funny. No wonder many would rather seek to erase them.

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107. Kalo Paska

by Nicholas Econopouly, greecetravel.com/photos/sixties/

In Greece in the 1960s Easter was the biggest holiday of the year, bigger than Christmas and much more eagerly anticipated. The blessings of Easter, or Paska, lasted all year long. Although we weren’t a religious family, in the spirit of Indian secularism and my mother’s unitarian socialist agnosticism (“God is all the Goodness in the world,” she told us), we celebrated every holiday there was, and the Greeks knew how to celebrate. All through Lent people had been fasting, denying themselves meat, fish, dairy products, wine, and even the ubiquitous olive oil that seemed to form the basis of every dish. They had also been cleaning and whitewashing their houses, purifying themselves inside and out.

Holy Friday was the most sombre day of Holy Week, one of deep mourning. All the lights of Athens were turned out, plunging even the Acropolis into darkness. Late on Saturday night, people bundled up warm and made their way to churches and monasteries all over the city. Since we lived at the base of Lykavittos, the tallest hill in Athens, with a monastery at the very top, we joined the throngs who walked up the steep, narrow path in single file, pairs, or small family groups, maintaining near-silence in keeping with the occasion.

At the top, the faithful entered the church to pray while the overflow waited expectantly, looking out over the city uncharacteristically wreathed in darkness and silent as the grave. Finally, at the stroke of midnight, all the lights came back on, brilliantly illuminating the Acropolis and the major churches throughout the city. The formerly subdued, almost sleep-walking crowds around us broke into lively cries of Xristos Anesti! (Christ is Risen), to which the reply was Alithea Anesti (Indeed, He is Risen)! And in the same instant came the sounds of the cracking of eggs, as people retrieved hard-boiled eggs from the depths of their coat pockets, dyed dark red, and cracked them against their neighbors’ eggs, wishing Kalo Paska (Happy Easter) to one and all and sharing freely with anyone who had come without.

Then came the lighting of the candles. Everybody had brought a candle from home, stowed in their pockets with the hard-boiled eggs. The first candle was lit from the ever-burning flame within the monastery, and one by one everyone lit their candles from the just-lit candle of their neighbors. When the last candle was lit, the return procession began, people talking animatedly now, but taking care to keep their candles alight and maintaining a joyful solemnity. Looking down from Lykavittos, we could see candlelit processions like our own winding their way home all over the city. When people reached home, they would make a cross with the smoke from their candles on the newly whitewashed walls above their front doors, to keep them safe from evil spirits throughout the coming year.

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I supposed that the Greek children went to bed when they got home, as we did. But I suspect that the women of the household got very little sleep that night, as they made the final preparations for the massive Easter feast that would break their fast on Easter Day. One Easter in Greece we were visiting the ancient city of Delphi, and the townspeople were roasting whole lambs on spits and dancing in the streets, spirits lifted high and wine flowing freely. Kalo Paska was on everyone’s lips and nobody was made to feel a stranger.

Greeks followed the Orthodox calendar, and when, years later, I married into a Ukrainian American family, I discovered that they did as well. Ukrainian Easter rarely falls on the same day as what they call “regular” or “American” Easter, and many of its customs and practices are very similar to the ones we first encountered in Greece. After midnight on Holy Saturday, the Ukrainians, like the Greeks, greet each other with Christ is Risen: Khrystos Voskres! and reply, Voistynu Voskres! They too crack and eat hard-boiled eggs, dyed dark red, although they spread them liberally with an eye-wateringly pungent horseradish sauce.

As I write, my sisters-in-law Eve and Vera are washing the dozens of coffee cans that Eve saves from year to year for baking babka, the Ukrainian sweet bread eaten only at Easter, spread with a heavenly soft cheese called paska. Eve has perfected her own recipes for both, which seem to get better every year. Vera is the guardian of the egg-painting supplies, so in keeping with the Ukrainian tradition of pysanky, we may decorate eggs tomorrow as well, although our  skills do not extend to the artistry and delicate precision of our cousin Juliana.

Kalo Paska and Happy Spring!

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103. Holi, Water Play, Rites of Spring

During the long summers as a child in Athens I joined the other children—mainly boys—in the streets of our neighborhood playing with cheap, brightly-colored plastic water pistols. They held less than a cup of water, sprayed only a short distance, and had to be refilled frequently—from where I don’t remember, probably our mothers’ kitchen taps. Despite having only two moving parts they still broke frequently, but that was part of the fun, too—running to the kiosk at the bottom of the hill clutching a handful of small change, selecting the color of a brand-new model, and racing back to join the fray. Running about joyfully, shouting and screaming, and getting wet: this was the point of it all.

As a girl in Kharagpur I remember hiding under the bed on the day of Holi, the spring festival of colors, as a noisy, exuberant crowd of my father’s students marched inexorably towards our bungalow. It was exhilarating but frightening, that day when everyone abandoned their customary restraint and soaked each other from head to toe with colored water. Our hair and skin were stained with the powerful dyes for days afterward and people who had only one or two changes of  clothes had to wear the brightly stained garments all year. Everything was all right once the students actually arrived and my mother had plied them with sweets; it was listening to the drumming and the wild shouts and cries of the approaching mob (or so it felt to me) that was so terrifying. Wearing my oldest clothes, I too went out with my friends, doing the rounds of the neighborhood with our buckets of colored water and plastic water squirters, delighting in spraying as many people as we possibly could while getting drenched ourselves.

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During the half-year we lived in India when Nikhil was eight, we were living in Pune when Holi came around. In the days leading up to it, while my kaki and cousins  prepared modaks and other seasonal delicacies, Andrew and Nikhil ventured into the Tulsibag market on a quest for the traditional piston-like water squirters, or pichkaris. One afternoon, when I had woken up from my afternoon nap and was having a quiet cup of tea with my cousin, they returned with their arms full of parcels, grinning from ear to ear. Besides several packages of water balloons, they had found two gorgeous specimens, antique pichkaris made of heavy brass, which they promptly proceeded to take apart, put together again, and test out on anyone within range. That Holi they stationed themselves on the roof with their new pichkaris,  several buckets of colored water, and dozens of water balloons at the ready. I must admit that I hid out for much of the mayhem, but Nikhil and Andrew entered fully into the carnivalesque spirit of the day. The blistering heat of summer came on cue immediately after Holi and poor Nikhil was stricken with a dangerously high fever for the next week, which I still l blame on the amount of dirty water he must have swallowed inadvertently. But I suspect that if you asked him he would say that it was all worth it.

Back in the United States super soakers had come into fashion. No longer simple little water pistols with reservoirs no bigger than a tea-cup, these were massive, multi-barreled, and powerful. They were to the puny plastic water pistols we played with in Greece what machine guns are to single-shot pistols. Nikhil and his friends would have summer parties featuring super soakers where they  broke into two teams and raced around the yard getting each other and themselves as wet as possible, pausing only to fill their reservoirs from a 55-gallon drum. My father purchased a super soaker for the sole purpose of scaring the squirrels off his bird-feeder. When I went over to with Nikhil, Dad would call Nikhil aside conspiratorially and take him into the bathroom, where they would fill the bright-yellow plastic contraption and he would station Nikhil just inside the house, ready to take aim through the sliding doors if he spotted a troublemaking squirrel climbing up the trumpet-vine to the bird-feeder.

Thankfully, Nikhil was no longer interested in such things by the time Paintball came on the scene, although he enjoyed playing Laser Tag for a short period in his adolescence (probably because it involved a trip to the mall with a group of his friends). Somehow Paintball crossed a line for me and I found it—still find it—disturbing. It’s too much like hunting down a human being. Why is it that people seem to become jaded with simple pleasures? Why keep upping the ante, moving on to play that requires ever-bigger and more menacing paraphernalia? As a child, it didn’t even occur to me to think of our water pistols as weapons but, for me at least, Laser Tag and Paintball are too closely associated with war games ever to be just harmless play.

In recent years people in India have become more aware of the toxicity of the artificial dyes used at Holi and are urging the use of environmentally-friendly ones, which is entirely a good thing. Holi, traditionally a holiday that gives people a once-a-year license to let loose, can become threatening, especially for women and in large crowds. Harmless play can suddenly turn to violence, and many people opt to stay indoors, as I found myself doing instinctively when I hid under the bed as a young girl. But while there’s always a fine line between joyful abandon and dangerous loss of control, every society needs its rites of Spring. To echo today’s greeting from an old classmate of mine on Facebook, I wish everyone a happy, colorful and safe Holi!

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96. Learning to Swim

photo by Leslie Mesogios F.M. from Panoramio.com

I learned to swim one summer on the Greek island of Poros.  Each of my parents had a teaching style that contributed to my eventual success, though I recognized this only in retrospect long afterwards.

My father was the first to try. He took me to a fisherman’s dock and we walked together to the end of the jetty.

“Jump!” He commanded.

“No!”

“Jump!” (louder)

“No!!” Even at not-yet-eight I could match my dad decibel for decibel.

“JUMP!!!” This time it was a bellow, and I jumped.

I sank to the bottom, bubbles escaping from my mouth and nose.  Without any effort on my part, it seemed, I soon found myself coming back up. I yelled for help, but succeeded only in gulping down a mouthful of sea water. Before I knew it I was going back down, down, down. . .

and coming back up again. As I rose to the surface for the second time I flailed my arms blindly but, immediately and inexorably, it seemed, began to sink.

Yet again I was propelled upwards but began to feel myself helplessly sinking again even as I broke the surface. “Going down for the third time,” came a small, wordless warning. Somehow that quiet voice penetrated my consciousness even as my body had already succumbed to the inevitability of a watery fate: I stretched out my hand and grabbed the edge of the dock. Dad was waiting there as I pulled myself back up. “There! Was that so bad after all?”

I said nothing. It hadn’t been so bad. All I had had to do was to reach out and catch hold; but I certainly wasn’t going to admit that to Dad. I sulked outwardly to cover an inward self-satisfaction as I walked back with him, dripping dry, to Mum, Sally, and breakfast.

Back in the early Sixties there wasn’t an established tourist trade in the Greek islands. Poros was a sleepy little fishing community and I can’t recall meeting any other foreigners or holiday-makers while we were there. I remember only vaguely the sunny, sparsely furnished room we stayed in, upstairs from the taverna where we also ate some of our meals. But I remember well our own completely private cove, the one we set out for every morning after breakfast, as soon as Mum had packed towels, plastic buckets and spades and rubber rings for me and two-and-a-half year-old Sally, and sandwiches for lunch. The rocky coastline of the island must have been made up of dozens of these coves, and ours was a gently ebbing and flowing pool of water warmed by the morning sun, protected from the force of the waves by a semi-circle of black rocks, with a firm, sandy beach sloping down to the sea: perfect for children.

With one exception: the jellyfish. Our little bay was swarming with them, and Sally and I were adamant about not setting even one toe in the water if there was any chance whatsoever of coming in contact with their gelatinous, flesh-crawling coldness. So, good father that he was, Dad went down ahead of us, diving repeatedly into the water until he had collected every single last jellyfish from the cove and set them all out on the rocks to dry. When the water could be definitively declared jellyfish-free, Sally and I consented to set out for the beach and flanked by each of our parents, to venture gingerly into the gloriously warm, gently undulating Aegean Sea.

Mum’s approach to teaching me to swim was gentle as the wavelets in the cove.  We waded into the water together until she was waist-deep and I chest-deep, safely inside the inflated rubber ring. As I stood on tiptoe with the water lapping at my chin and my fingers grasping the edge of the ring, Mum quietly swam a few strokes away from me, breaststroke, head-above-water, as always. Then, standing no more than ten feet away, she reached out both arms and said quietly, “Come to me.” I hesitated, but not for long. I could almost reach out and touch her, I knew from the day before that the water itself would lift me up, and besides, I had the rubber ring. With hardly a second thought I took  the leap of faith and flung myself toward her, arms frantically doggy-paddling, feet lifting off the sea floor almost of their own accord. Within seconds I was there. I had done it, and everyone was cheering.

It wasn’t hard to take the next step and discard the rubber ring; in fact it was easier to swim forward without it in the way. I was a swimmer now and no longer feared the sea. Looking back, I see that each of my parents’ approaches nicely complemented the other. If my father had tried shouting at me again, I would probably have dug in my heels, stuck out my lower lip, and stubbornly refused to move. But if I hadn’t learned the day before that the water would naturally buoy me up, I might not have dared entrust myself to the waves, no matter how gently my mother had urged me on. Still, my swimming prowess stopped somewhere in-between Mum’s cautious, head-above-water breast-stroke and Dad’s easy, confident crawl.

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